What is cycle time, and why is it important to in-house legal departments?

The short answer is that cycle time measures how long it takes to complete one unit of work from start to finish.

But in fact, it’s not really about finding out how long a business process takes, so much as about unbundling the process in order to discover where you can increase efficiency, cut costs, maybe strip out some elements of risk and hopefully add value.

Let’s get into that in a bit more detail.

Meet process engineering

I like to set the scene by talking about Formula 1 pit stops.

If you’re as interested in F1 as I am, you’ll know that in 2005, excluding refuelling, it took 6 seconds to change a tire, comprising 1 second to jack up the cars when they stopped in the pit; 1.5 seconds each to remove the old tires, fit the new tires and drop the car; plus a 0.5 of a second to release the car.

Yet in 2026, all these steps can be accomplished in a 1.8 second heartbeat.[1]

How has FI managed to make this process a massive 70% quicker? The answer is process engineering.

In the legal context

How does process engineering apply in a legal context?

It’s simply the idea that if you identify and unpack the stages in a process in order to establish the cycle time, you’re starting to shine a very bright light on things.

This reveals the process’s inner workings: what’s going right, what’s going wrong, why some things are taking longer and also hopefully what can be fixed with more learning, or more training, or an adjustment to the process, so process engineering.

Document lifecycles

Given that documents are the lifeblood of legal practice, gaining a better understanding of the cycle time of the documents in your business will be valuable.

In my experience, a typical document cycle time can be broken down into the following stages:

However, the sharp-eyed reader will have noticed that this table skips Stage 3 – which is the meat in the sandwich.

Once a document is generated there’s almost always a period of review and negotiation before signing. It’s this stage that invariably takes the most time. In fact, experience suggests this is typically around 14 days (but can take much longer), which catapults the document cycle time up something north of 24 days.

This is both good and bad. The bad is that it’s likely a lot of time is not spent well. The good is that there’s likely scope for process engineering to step in and make beneficial changes.

You should be asking: where are the bottlenecks, are documents looping, is there duplication of effort, what is causing the delays?

The end game is to reduce cycle time, bearing in mind that when you do so you can:

• increase capacity without increasing resources;
• improve planning and forecasting;
• enhance your internal and external stakeholders’ experience;
• mitigate some risks like missed deadlines and regulatory breaches; and
• set a baseline for continuous improvement.

In the table above I quoted common timescales, but do you know the document cycle times in your business? Legal departments that gather their own data can start to ask the right questions and get some useful answers.

The power of cycle times is that once we start to measure them, we can start to make improvements.

[1] In fact, the Red Bull team posted this world record time of 1.8 seconds at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix.